Family change

Question 1

What is family?

Answer 1

Primary theoretical background for understanding family change remains the social institutional framework (Durkheim & Parsons):
Family was understood in terms of its place in society and its “important functions such as reproduction, socialization, and care for the emotional needs of members of society […,] conceptualized as a particular social structure with established roles, norms, and values for regulating individual behavior in such a way that it enabled the performance of its vital functions.” (Knapp & Wurm, 2019: 213)

“Cultural norms and institutions have supported a definition of family […] and kinship […] as those individuals related by blood or law, leaving little flexibility in the construction and interpretation of familial bonds.” (Sanner et al. 2021: 424)

–> established roles & clear boundaries who belongs: blood/law)

• Nuclear family model: married couple + children in single household - as the standard defining kinship in Western cultures ?

Question 2

Processes of family change

2) Deinstitutionalization of family (Cherlin):

Answer 2

• Family change is theorized as moving from a previously institutionalized state to an increasingly deinstitutionalized form:
• Social norms about roles (and role enactment) in families dissolve; individuals are free and at the same time forced to actively construct role relationships in the family as social context lacks normative ordering: “reality is both objectively present (Tracy is Sarah’s stepmother because she married Sarah’s father) and subjectively apprehended (who is Tracy to Sarah – a friend, family member, or parent?)” (Sanner et al., 2021: 425) => from institution to companionship …

Question 3

What are functional & structural family changes?

Answer 3

• Changing functions (=> e.g. through evolution of modern welfare state institutions = old age security) & changing functioning of families (=> e.g. gendered division of labor, quality of family relations, etc.)
• Changing generational structure: from pyramid to beanpole
• also growing diversity of household & family types

Question 4

How did intimate/romantic relationships change?

1) marriage

Answer 4

1) Reduced marriage rates

• Quantum:
  slight decline (5%) in people who ever marry in US
  + education: Among White women, college graduates were once less likely to have married than women with less education, but this gap gradually closed since 1960
• Timing:

Part of the decline in the percentage of married adults is due to large increases in age at first marriage (longer singlehood)

E.g. changing socio-economic conditions, under which entering marriage (and having children) seemed feasible or desirable

Question 5

How did intimate/romantic relationships change?

2) cohabitation

Answer 5

2) Cohabitation:

Alternative, not just a precursor to marriage
due to Second Demographic Transition

Question 6

How did intimate/romantic relationships change?

3) Divorce (US/Germany)

Answer 6

• Divorce rates increased until 1970/80s in the US, in Germany until around 2000s (big exception both: golden age of marriage)
• Then decreased - why?

1. Increasing positive selection into marriage: Given ever-later ages of first marriage, those who do marry young may be an increasingly select group of highly committed couples
2. Aging population: In addition, the aging of the population implies increasing numbers of older married couples who tend to have lower (although increasing) divorce rates than younger married couples

Germany:

• 1st dip: Golden age of marriage
• 2nd dip: change in divorce law
• 3rd dip: unification

Question 7

How did intimate/romantic relationships change?

4) Separation

Answer 7

DEPENDS –> stark educational differences + parenthood

Probability of marital dissolution (seperation/divorce - whichever occured first) after 20 years of marriage in 2006 to 2010 was
- 22% for college graduates
- 61% for those without a high school diploma or GED

The highly educated have increasingly stable marriages relative to their less-educated counterparts in a number of other countries

• Nowadays: (Increasingly) negative association between parenthood, education, and separation: Lower risk of separation with child(ren) and the higher the education

Question 8

How did Covid-19 effect relationship quality?

Answer 8

Substantial decrease in relationship quality (Schmid et al. 2021):

• Substantial proportion of respondents experiencing positive (20%) or negative (40%) changes in relationship satisfaction during the crisis
• For men and women alike, almost irrespective of whether they experienced COVID-19-related changes in their employment situation
• Presence of children seemed to buffer partly against a COVID-19-related decrease
  –> COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a threat to couples’ relationship quality and healthy family functioning more generally

Question 9

housework/childcare time division?

Answer 9

• Housework: women = less time due to technological advance)
• Childcare: Both women & men did more

-> explained by changes in behavior rather than compositional changes!

Question 10

How have family age structures changed?

Answer 10

• less children/siblings that need our help or vice versa
• more (grand- )parents in family network + longer years of ‘shared lives’ across generations –> increasing importance of multigenerational bonds

Question 11

Adult children & geographic mobility = problem?

Answer 11

Concern: increasing geographic mobility in ‘modern’ societies reduces the amount of interaction between adult children and older parents (decline in co-residence), resulting in an ‘isolated nuclear family’ (Parsons, 1943):

• The distance between parents and their adult children is steadily increasing as a result of social change: While 38.4 % of parents lived in the same neighborhood or town as their adult children in 1996, only about 25.8 % did so in 2014. Younger parents are more affected by growing residential distances than older parents.
• In particular, highly educated parents have adult children living farther away: in 2014, about one-third of the adult children of parents with low education live in the neighborhood or in the same place (35.6 percent). Among highly educated parents, only 19.9 percent do.
• BUT: The frequency of contact and the amount of relationships between parents and adult children remain stably high: over the entire period between 1996 and 2014, more than 78 % of parents had have contact at least weekly, and more than 88 % of parents have a close or very close relationship with their adult children. Mothers have more contact-intensive and emotionally close relationships than fathers

Question 12

Geographical proximity addition: material/instrumental support

Answer 12

Proportion of older generation providing material transfers (+ childcare) to younger generation (incl. grandchildren!) increased while proportion receiving instrumental support declined: opportunities vs. needs

Parents tend to minimize the amount of instrumental support they receive from their children in order to preserve a self-concept of functional competence and avoid the stigma of being a “burden” BUT maybe also not so much instrumental help needed

Question 13

Delay of grandparenthood?

Answer 13

• From prewar to postwar: age increased by ca. 3 months per year
• (Changes and) Stability in the life-course context:

1) grandparent and worker roles coincided frequently, despite an overall downward trend (continuous overlap with worker roles, da erst immer noch erst grandparent, dann retirement, aber overlapping window scheint enger zu warden)
2) parent and grandparent roles were apart already in prewar cohorts and have further decoupled. As a result, role overlaps have vanished almost entirely ( decoupling of grandparenthood from active parenthood, also non-active parenthood window wird tendenziell größer bis zum ersten grand-child)
3) frequent overlap and stability over time between grandparent and filial roles, given that delays in grandparenthood were paralleled by concurrent increases in age at parents’ death (continuous overlap with filial roles, da life expentancy immer höher wird, ist man grandparent, aber hat auch selbst mind. noch 1 parent)
* suggest that the shared lifetime of grandparents and grandchildren does not necessarily increase, as the effects of rising life expectancy may be counterbalanced by fertility delays in successive generations, suggesting equal spacing of transitions within longer lives

–> rather stability than change

Question 14

How have families gotten more complex?

Answer 14

• The case of step-relations: Step-relations today most likely result from repartnering after biological parents’ separation, not death anymore.
• The diversity of living arrangements is steadily increasing –> main reason for this pluralization: loss of importance of the male breadwinner model. This trend is more pronounced in eastern Germany than in western Germany.
• Entropy peaks at around 30 as well as 60 years of age, because a change of life form frequently occurs here. For example, marriage is particularly common around age 30, and the transition to the ‘empty nest’ phase is concentrated in the sixth decade of life.

Question 15

How are same-sex families developing?

(partnership, childbearing, divorce)

Answer 15

• Increase in same-sex partnerships in BUT (presumably) no change in sexual orientation, but rather changes in social & institutional circumstances (i.e. legal recognition, societal mindset changed, etc.)
• Childbearing increasing / reverse to opposite-sex
• Divorce rates increasing but same-sex women highest rate -> feminization of same-sex couple dynamics (women in the Nordic region have
  become much more prone than men to enter same-sex marriages but are also much more
  likely than men to dissolve their union through divorce)

Question 16

Convergence of family systems around the world?

Answer 16

In the mid-1960s, Goode made the theoretical argument that there would be a transformation in family systems around the world, from long-standing traditional forms to the conjugal household, suggesting that family systems around the world would eventually converge with the Western nuclear family bc most compatible with the growth of market capitalism and a job-based economy

• Western family system had changed to fit (adapt to) an economy that increasingly required more education and geographic mobility. These changes in turn would erode the authority of family elders and reduce their formal control over their children
• would initiate free mate choice based on compatibility and sentiment rather than on family interests or parental control
• similar to democratic trans theory (data collected in West, observed only in West, fitted nicely into capitalism, transferred to global perspective)

Question 17

Convergence of family systems around the world?

Answer 17

In the mid-1960s, Goode made the theoretical argument that there would be a transformation in family systems around the world, from long-standing traditional forms to the conjugal household, suggesting that family systems around the world would eventually converge with the Western nuclear family* bc most compatible with the growth of market capitalism and a job-based economy

*expectation of strong marital bonds, lower fertility, and fewer intergenerational households

• Western family system had changed to fit (adapt to) an economy that increasingly required more education and geographic mobility. These changes in turn would erode the authority of family elders and reduce their formal control over their children
• would initiate free mate choice based on compatibility and sentiment rather than on family interests or parental control

Question 18

Critique of Goode’s theory?

Answer 18

Frankenstein (2015) = economic development does not take place in isolation from broader societal changes –> further - independent - influences

• Theorists have argued that 1) culture is an independent influence
• so are 2) law and public policy as an independent institutional driver of change both in the developed and developing worlds
• as well as 3) changing demographic pressures owing to declines in mortality and fertility that prompted changes in the timing of life events such as marriage and childbearing ages
• and 4) reproductive technology, has brought about new possibilities in the timing and organization of the life course, indicating that technology can also have an independent influence on change in family patterns

Question 19

Global family research adequate?

Answer 19

“At the global level, the process of change in families and family domains is inadequately understood.” Research lacking behind: “Transformations in families are a latecomer in social and economic changes occurring during the demographic transition, declines in fertility and mortality are often preconditions for substantial systemic change”

Question 20

Frankenstein’s determinants of global family change?

Answer 20

Question 21

Some empirical findings of global family research (4)

Answer 21

• Increasing age at first marriage & weakening of the institution of marriage: Rise in cohabitation, divorce, premarital sexual behavior & childbearing
• Declining fertility (including growing childlessness)
• Changing gender roles (e.g. rise in female employment)
• Decline of intergenerational households

–> Transformations occur “differently across domains, world regions, and sexes”, best captured with “persistent diversity with development.” (Pesando & GFC Team, 2019: 158)

• development not a powerful driver of convergence for all outcomes, suggesting the need to take into account additional factors (i.e. geo-historical legacy, differences in social/economic institutions)

Question 22

Processes of family change

3) Diversification:

Answer 22

• framework stands diametrically opposed to social institutional approach, which theorizes family in terms of a singular dimensionality & vertical relationality
• most essential defining feature is its commitment to negation: the denial of any singular conception of “the family” as normative (i.e. nuclear model) but numerous concepts of family exist and that speaking of ‘the family’ may obscure more than it reveals
• proper theoretical move is to give up “the search for a uniform definition of family or household in favor of contingent characterizations in different cultural contexts” (i.e. fictive kin, families of choice, etc.)

Question 23

Family change

1) Decline vs adaption?

Answer 23

In the late 20th century, the debate around family change centered on whether the family as a social institution was experiencing family decline or moving through a period of family adaptation.

–> Family decline (e.g. decline in marriage rates indicating disintegration) vs. family adaptation (e.g. cohabitation complementing / substituting marriage) -> e.g. marriage rates - indicator for decline or adaption?

Today, however, the debate has moved away from how well family is performing its important functions as a social institution to whether family can be regarded as having institutional dimensions at all:
Is family life today experiencing deinstitutionalization, such that family is becoming so individualized that it is no longer best understood in institutional terms? Or is family life experiencing diversification that expands but maintains a capacity for speaking of family in some sort of institutional terms?